imagine that I'm in the vanguard of the science
of mass murders and mass burials. This wasn't
supposed to happen today."
Rubenstein is an anthropologist and a civilian
employee of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
He's also the deputy director of the forensics lab
at Camp Slayer near Baghdad. For two years,
even as Iraq's insurgency has grown deadlier,
Rubenstein and a small team of scientists, most
from the U.S. but also a few from other coali
tion countries, have been exhuming remains
from mass graves. Using forensic techniques
linking bones, clothing remnants, identity cards,
jewelry, photographs with names on captured
government death warrants-they're coaxing
secrets out of the death pits to determine who
the victims were, where they came from, who
killed them, and how, when, and why. Since
2004, U.S. officials say, hundreds of skeletons
have been exhumed and turned over to the
forensics team.
Although that number is tiny compared with
the total number of Iraqis murdered, the effort
is an impressive marshaling of the forces of sci
ence, all aimed at building airtight legal cases.
The forensic work at Camp Slayer is spon
sored and choreographed by the U.S. Depart
ment of Justice, whose vested interest in proving
Saddam Hussein a mass murderer has evolved
as the Bush Administration's stated reasons for
invading Iraq (weapons of mass destruction,
links to 9/11) have proved false. Still, even as
the death count mounts by the day-an esti
mated 26,000 Iraqis and 2,000 Americans and
allies killed by late 2005-the investigation could
bring value that surpasses the warfare and pol
itics of the moment. If the forensics specialists
demonstrate that Saddam Hussein and other
mass murderers can be successfully brought to
justice, they may help build a potent preventive
against genocides of the future. This, at least, is
the idealistic hope.
The forensics facility occupies part of the
grounds of a former palace compound of Sad
dam Hussein's, a onetime pleasure court with
swimming pools and boating ponds that now
bristles with antennas and satellite dishes ser
vicing CIA, FBI, and U.S. military intelligence
operations. Rubenstein walked me through a
quaintly incongruous white picket fence to
a cluster of well-lit, air-conditioned tents, where
I met specialists examining, x-raying, and pho
tographing skeletons and studying clothing and
artifacts such as jewelry, wallets, and govern
ment identity cards. Patterns of neat bullet holes
peppered skulls and garments, many of them
the baggy trousers peculiar to Kurdish men. Star
ing at cardboard boxes filled with skulls in plas
tic bags and skeletons precisely arrayed on steel
gurneys, inhaling the oddly metallic death smells,
I flashed on America's current fascination with
AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU 1944
The simple possessions of the doomed lie pre
served behindglass at the largestof the Nazi
death camps. Stripped of their identities,Jews
and others were murdered here by the most
organizedkilling machine the world has known.
JANE EVELYNATWOOD,CONTACTPRESSIMAGES